‘Yunan’ review: Enigmatic second film in Ameer Fakher Eldin’s ‘Homeland’ trilogy

Dir/scr: Ameer Fakher Eldin. Germany/Canada/France/Italy/Palestine/Jordan. 2025. 124mins

A collection of low-lying German islands which have realized to reside with seasonal flooding are each setting and metaphor in Palestinian writer-director Ameer Fakher Eldin’s quiet, atmospheric but additionally moderately hermetically-sealed second function. Cutaways to a fable-within-the-film that performs out in an arid Center Japanese panorama counsel an allegory of misplaced or displaced homelands, however Eldin, who was born in Kyiv to Syrian dad and mom from the disputed Golan Heights, leaves the symbolic import of this poetic function huge open to interpretation.

Eldin has an actual knack for cinematic temper portray

Introduced in Competitors on the 2025 Berlinale, Yunan is the second a part of a trilogy the director has known as ‘Homeland’, that started together with his well-received 2021 debut The Stranger. (Eldin is already at work on the ultimate half, Nostalgia: A Story In Its First Chapters). These hungry for brand spanking new auteurs could also be curious to catch Yunan, a movie which confirms Eldin has an actual knack for cinematic temper portray, in additional pageant play, at the very least. (It has already wrapped offers for co-pro territories Germany and Canada.)

Lebanese actor Georges Khabbaz, finest identified for his position in Beneath  Te Bombs, performs Munir, a depressed author residing in Hamburg. When a physician prescribes relaxation for his stress-related panic assaults, Munir travels by prepare and ferry to the Hallig islands off the coast of northern Germany. There’s no room on the islands’ solitary inn – the one lodging cautious however kindly landlady Valeska (Hanna Schygulla) can provide is a dilapidated home awaiting restoration. Munir takes it, as a result of while you’ve determined to finish all of it (an intention flagged just about from the get-go), wherever will do.

However the desperately melancholic author’s artistic block additionally leaves him unable to drag the set off, and so he roams this flat, windy waterscape, braving bulls in fields, listening to the gale, the gulls and the rising sea – a part of a wealthy soundscape that merges with the swarming notes of Suad Bushnaq’s evocative soundtrack. His otherness is commented solely in hostile glances – particularly from Valeska’s younger grownup son Karl (Tom Wlaschiha) – or studious avoidance by  the few ruddy-faced islanders. Solely Valeska herself, a grounded character who emanates a nice Zen calmness, accepts him with out questions.

Interleaved with the Hallig island sections are a collection of insets involving a narrative that Munir’s dementia-afflicted mom likes to recount – a couple of mute shepherd who lives in an arid Biblical panorama together with his flocks and exquisite younger spouse. Shot in Italy’s Puglia area however clearly imagined to evoke an archaic rural Palestine, this fable is suggestive with out being incisive. Definitely the distinction between two pastoral communities is stark – one dry, steep and rocky, the opposite inexperienced and so soaked in water it may possibly’t soak up any extra.